film festival Archives

Feb232025 by cineverseNo Comments

Box Office: ‘The Monkey’ Drums Up $5.8 Million Opening Day, ‘Captain America’ Gets Second Term on Top

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By J. Kim Murphy According To The variety Neon’s horror comedy “The Monkey” is seeing and doing a strong opening weekend, though it’ll take silver at the box office behind Disney’s “Captain America: Brave New World,” still on top of the charts but facing a substantial tumble in its second weekend. “The Monkey” chopped into an estimated $5.8 million from 3,200 theaters across Friday and preview screenings. That puts it on track for Neon’s second-biggest opening weekend ever, only falling behind director Osgood Perkins‘ prior horror film at the banner, last summer’s breakout “Longlegs.” Reviews have been positive for this follow-up, though audiences are mixed with ticketbuyer survey firm Cinema Score logging a “C+.” Horror films skew lower in those polls though; beyond that, “Long...

Feb232025 by cineverseNo Comments

Dreams (Sex Love)’ Wins the Berlin Film Festival, While ‘The Blue Trail’ Earns Grand Jury Prize

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By Peter Debruge According To The variety The 75th anniversary edition of the Berlin Film Festival — and the first under the leadership of its new chief, Tricia Tuttle — drew to a close Saturday night, as the jury awarded the Golden Bear to Dag Johan Haugerud’s “Dreams (Sex Love).” There’s a special poetry to this film — the portrait of a teenage girl with a passionate imagination who pours her intense feelings toward a teacher into a transformative personal essay — taking the festival’s top prize, since it marks the third installment in the Norwegian writer-director’s “Dream Sex Love” trilogy. The first, “Sex,” premiered a year earlier in the Panorama section of the 2024 Berlin Film Fest, while “Love” debuted in competition at Venice late last summer. The film...

Feb232025 by cineverseNo Comments

Yes, It Can Happen Here. And the Movies Warned Us

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By Owen Gleiberman According To The variety A couple of months ago, I had a movie experience that truly shook me up. It was early December, and I was in the middle of my end-of-the-year marathon, catching up with the big prestigious awards-season films I’d missed. One of them was “I’m Still Here,” Walter Salles’ acclaimed true-life drama, set in Brazil in 1970, about a family whose exuberant and loving existence falls off a cliff when the father, Rubens Paiva (Selton Mello), is taken in for police questioning by the country’s military dictatorship. His wife, Eunice (Fernanda Torres), is told that it’s a routine interrogation, and that he’ll be back within a matter of hours. But that doesn’t happen. The hours stretch into days, then weeks, and then months. He is never heard fro...

Feb222025 by cineverseNo Comments

George Armitage, ‘Grosse Pointe Blank’ and ‘Miami Blues’ Director, Dies at 83

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By Pat Saperstein According To The variety George Armitage, who directed, wrote and produced films including “Grosse Pointe Blank” and “Miami Blues,” died Saturday in Playa del Rey, his son Brent confirmed. He was 83. Raised in Hartford, Conn., Armitage started out in the 20th Century Fox mailroom before becoming associate producer on the long-running series “Peyton Place” in the 1960s. He met Roger Corman on the Fox lot and moved into feature films, writing the Corman-produced 1970 comedy “Gas! – Or – It Became Necessary to Destroy the World in Order to Save It.” He continued making films for Corman and his brother Gene Corman, moving into directing with “Private Duty Nurses.” The 1972 Blaxploitation film “Hit Man,” which he directed and co-wrote, starred Pam Grier and Bernie Cas...

Feb192025 by cineverseNo Comments

Spring Night’ Review: Kang Mi-ja Returns With a Compact Co-Dependency Drama

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By Siddhant Adlakha According To The variety The second feature from Kang Mi-ja — and her first after a gap of 17 years — “Spring Night” is a tender, compact relationship drama about ships passing in the night, buoyed by a pair of stellar performances working in completely different modes. Adapted from Kwon Yeo-sun’s novel, its tale of an alcoholic woman and an arthritic man meeting in middle age has a fairytale-like quality, and an oblique telling that skips through time in both unique and familiar ways. While this temporal hopscotch helps it re-create intriguing sensations, it prevents the film from completely connecting, despite the occasionally shattering moments its actors createThe way Kang introduces her characters has a definitive quality bordering on prescriptive, but...

Feb192025 by cineverseNo Comments

All Quiet on the Berlin Deals Front but EFM Still Serves as an Efficient Marketplace, Buyers Report

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By Leo Barraclough According To The variety It’s all quiet on the Berlin deals front as the sales agencies wind down their operations at the European Film Market. By Monday, many offices and stands were almost completely deserted. Deals are being reported but it’s more of a “steady flow” than a gush. That said, most sales agents remain happy that the EFM continues to be an “efficient” place to do business. AGC Studios’ Stuart Ford tells Variety, “Overseas business has been very solid. International buyers are taking their time, but we’ve been seeing a steady flow of deals closing and fully expect that trend to continue apace, particularly on Bill Condon’s ‘Kiss of the Spider Woman’ and Noah Hawley’s ‘Nowhere Fast.’” Oliver Berben, head of German production and distributi...

Feb182025 by cineverseNo Comments

Girls on Wire’ Review: Two Cousins Reunited on a Chinese Film Set Are Trapped in a Melodrama of Their Own Making

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By Peter Debruge According To The variety Flying high in one of the world’s most male-dominated film industries, Chinese writer-director Vivian Qu follows up her acclaimed 2017 drama “Angels Wear White” with the almost-good “Girls on Wires.” Focused on the uneasy reunion between two estranged cousins who team up to beat the cycle of drug abuse and debt that’s been dragging their family down for decades, this is ambitious, moral-minded cinema for a mainstream Chinese audience, and as such, it seems only fair to forgive the kind of hammy acting and manipulative melodrama Americans accept from Clint Eastwood and Tyler Perry movies. There’s something charmingly old-fashioned in the way Qu tries to move viewers, using flashbacks to memories between cutie-pie kiddos Fang Di and T...